Week 13: Brother, I'm Dying featuring Babel

This week’s reading is called Brother, I’m Dying by author Edwidge Danticat. Brother, I’m Dying primarily follows Danticat through her childhood in Haiti before she joins her parents who have already migrated to America for a better life. Through at first glance, it may appear as an autobiography it is actually a family memoir of sorts as she also dictates in her book the lives of her father Andre Danticat, and her Uncle Joseph Danticat and their trials and struggles before their arrival to the U.S and after also. Interestingly, this book in particular brought up problems that most migrants even face today. One of the problems being that of the unfamiliarity children of migrant parents face when they have not seen their migrant parents on a continuous basis throughout their childhood.

Rhacel Salazar Parenas makes a valid statement in her book Children of Global Migration when she says, “Distance breeds unfamiliarity and this unfamiliarity leads to discomfort.” (73) She attributes this quote to the feelings of awkwardness and estrangement one of her interviewees felt in her book when coming face to face with their migrant parent after their time away from them. There is one part in Danticat’s book that only further validates this statement when she sees her parents in Haiti after they have been away for a while. “Until that moment, aside from the butter cookies and restrained words of his letters, my father had mostly been a feeling for me, powerful yet vague, without a real face, a real body, like the one looming over the pecan-hued little boy who was looking up at Nick, Bob, and me.” (205/646) Danticat had barely seen her parents for a while so here in this quote she is describing this feeling of unfamiliarity with her father. Sadly, this is a normal feeling that children of migrant parents feel towards their parents, this unfamiliarity, but as I have stated above this is not the only problem Danticat brings up in her book. She also describes her Uncle Joseph’s desperate attempt at trying to enter the U.S after the chaos that breaks out in 2004 when the UN sends Peacekeepers to Haiti. He arrives in the U.S with possession of a passport and tourist visa, but because of the circumstances and his intent to return later, he insists on asking for “temporary asylum,” not understanding what it fully means. He then faces problems with Homeland Security after making this statement and being questioned he ends up in prison.  Danticat questions why this happens in her book, “While Hondurans and Nicaraguans have continued to receive protected status for nearly ten years since Hurricane Mitch struck their homelands, Haitians were deported to the flood zones weeks after Tropical Storm Jeanne blanketed an entire city in water the way Hurricane Katrina did parts of New Orleans. Was my uncle going to jail because he was Haitian? This is a question he probably asked himself. This is a question I still ask myself.” (525/646) There was another similar circumstance in the movie 'Babel' when the nanny illegally takes her charges across the border to Mexico and is unable to get her American charges back into the U.S. Interestingly, it was easy to get them into Mexico but not to get them out. These two different instances reminds the reader or movie watcher of the ‘walls’ the U.S has in place to keep people in and out. In Wendy Brown’s book, ‘Walled States, Waning Sovereignty’ she reminds us that this is not only what walls only do. They ‘confer magical protection against powers incomprehensibly large, corrosive, and humanely uncontrolled…. they produce not the future of an illusion, but the illusion of a future aligned with an idealized past (p. 133). So while the reader of this book or watcher of this movie may think this is typically ‘unfair treatment’ we have to realize that these walls do serve a lot of different and greater purposes. This is a lesson that has to be kept in mind while reading this part of the book or seeing this part of the movie. Sadly there were bad turnouts to both stories Danticat's Uncle Joseph ends up dying in the prison and the nanny is forced to stay in Mexico. 

Overall, this book was very well written, it allows the reader to think of the huge problems that people of foreign countries both face inside and outside the U.S. and how much change still needs to happen, and it makes you wonder, when will this change occur?